Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (best color ebook reader .txt) 📗

and wander the yard with memories

clouded around my head

like fog on a winter morning –

cleaning fish on a splintered wooden bench,

playing bass drum on a rusted iron kettle with two legs left,

splinters and firewood and fireworks

all the happy man-smells of my boyhood.

I walk alone through the crowd

and murmur appropriate noises

at appropriate times;

nod thankyous to neighbors,

hug old women who remember

when I was that high,

hug an uncomprehending grandchild

and run the gauntlet of tasteless casseroles

scattered amidst the multi-colored Pyrex mosaic

that litters groaning countertops.

We dress in our finest suits of grief –

a velvet jacket of hugs and tears,

a belt of leathern spiky anger,

vest of vague half-sewn regrets

and lavender pocket square of nostalgia

topped off with a too-tight necktie of sobs

and half-remembered stories

while we try to make sense

of the new truth you left us with.

11

Cheers

I woke up hung over. Again. With no idea of where I was. Again. With a woman whose name I didn’t remember asleep on my arm. Again. This was getting to be a habit, one that wouldn’t be so bad if there was anything good to be said for it. So I slowly and gently slid my arm out from under my sleeping bedmate, trying like hell not to wake her, and started the search for my clothes.

As I scanned the bedroom for my clothes, I began to take stock of the room and the woman who belonged there as obviously as I did not. She was stunning, a brunette goddess of the professional set rather than the emaciated, coke-strewn model set. She looked a little like the best bits of Sandra Bullock, Eva Longoria, and Angelina Jolie all got tossed into a blender and poured out onto eight-hundred thread count sheets of Egyptian cotton. One long, long leg was tangled outside the sheets, and the comforter was thrown halfway across the room to land partially atop the hardwood dresser. No IKEA for this lady’s boudoir, that was for sure. I wondered briefly where I had met her and wished I could remember what line I used to score a night with a woman that beautiful. My best pickups are always vampires; they never last past daybreak.

It took a few minutes, but I found everything. Well, almost everything. Socks are the enemy to nameless, faceless trysts. They treat morning-after retreats like laundry day and always end up with at least one MIA. So I carried my shoes and crept out her front door with one sock on, and slipped into my shoes on the front stoop of her building. I thought I had gotten away clean when I heard a window open above me.

“You forgot something,” I heard from the third floor. I looked up, and she was leaning out of the window mostly wrapped in a sheet, her hair spilling down over her left eye like an over-eroticized Jessica Rabbit. One amazing breast was playing peek-a-boo as she reared her arm back and threw my sock at my head. I caught it, heard her mutter “asshole” under her breath and slam the window as I shoved the sock into the front pocket of my pants.

I found a couple of crumpled dollar bills in the pocket with the sock and bought a cup of coffee from a cart on the corner. I stood there for a moment and squinted into the sunlight, trying to get my bearings. It looked like I’d ended up all the way over in Queens, a pretty good feat since I knew I didn’t start last night with enough cash on hand for that kind of cab fare. And that was not the kind of woman who spent much time on the subway. I checked my pockets and found my wallet (devoid of cash), cell phone (dead battery), and a claim check for valet parking on the Upper East Side.

Odd, seeing as how I don’t own a car. And can’t afford to eat anywhere on the Upper East Side. My sunglasses were still in my shirt pocket, so I slid them on, slugged down the last of the coffee to get the cat-shit hangover taste out of my mouth, and dug my MetroCard out of the folds of my wallet. I started down the steps to the subway, peeking at the dates on the newspapers trying to figure out how many days I’d lost this time.

Looked like it really was Sunday, so just a few hours for a change. Maybe things were getting a little better, after all. Of course, as soon as I thought that, I slipped on the steps leading down to the platform and landed on my ass in a puddle of puke. So much for things getting better. Oh well, looking on the bright side, at least I didn’t have any coffee left to spill on my crotch.

A half hour on the subway later, and I was staggering up the steps to my oh-so-humble abode. The door was slightly ajar, which was not how I had left things, so it was with a certain level of caution that I entered my foyer. Foyer has always been a generous term for the eight feet of hallway between my front door and kitchen, but it’s the term we have, so there it is. My morning went from bad to worse when I turned the corner and saw, standing in the squalor that is my kitchen, my worst nightmare.

“Hi, Ma.” My mother, the matriarch of all my familial nightmares, stood in my kitchen wearing an expression that can only be described as utter, blinding, nauseated disgust. She was, as always, immaculately turned out in her Sunday best, this time a solemn black dress with a black hat and black patent leather shoes that had been polished to within an inch of their life. Under the veil of the too-small dress I could see the outline of a girdle that was stretched far beyond the laws of physics, and her plump feet were spilling up and out of the tops of pumps